How did the Indian variant take hold in pockets of the UK?

Boris Johnson has warned that today’s easing of lockdown restrictions must come with a “heavy dose of caution” as the Indian variant of Covid-19 becomes dominant in pockets of the country.

Labour has accused the prime minister of a “reckless failure to protect our borders”, saying he acted too late in banning travel from India to prevent the spread of B16172.

The government has intensified its testing and surveillance programme in the areas affected, such as Bolton and Blackburn – with more than 1,300 cases of the variant now reported in the UK. It has not ruled out future localised lockdowns to prevent the spread. But how did the B16172 variant take hold?

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Delay in travel ban

The government added India to its red list of countries on 23 April, three weeks after announcing a ban on flights from neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh, both of which had lower rates of coronavirus. Analysis of Civil Aviation Authority figures suggested that 20,000 people arrived from India in that three-week period, according to The Sunday Times.

The newspaper says there are “tensions in Whitehall about whether Johnson delayed putting India on the red list because he was hoping to fly to Delhi on April 25 to discuss a post-Brexit trade deal with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi”. Downing Street has denied that was the case, but shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds insists “the PM has serious questions to answer”.

The unvaccinated

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said the “vast majority” of the 18 people in Bolton who have been hospitalised with the new Covid variant had refused the offer of a vaccine. Speaking to Sky’s Sophy Ridge, he said “early” clinical data from Oxford University found that the vaccines offer protection against the variant, but that it “can really spread like wildfire amongst the unvaccinated groups”.

While more than 20 million people across the nation have now received both jabs, none of the three vaccines being deployed is 100% effective, a proportion of people in the priority groups have not taken up the offer, and there are still millions of younger people who are yet to be invited for their shot. “In Bolton, the areas with the highest infections over the last week map very closely to areas with the lowest vaccination rates,” notes the BBC.

The wait for data

On Friday, the government said there was no firm evidence that the Indian variant led to more severe cases of the disease but that “the speed of growth is concerning”. Johnson has said the race between the “vaccination programme and the virus may be about to become a great deal tighter”, but that scientists would need two or three weeks to see the impact of the variant.

The BBC says it is neighbourhoods, like parts of Bolton, “with dense urban housing, that have been vulnerable to coronavirus since the start of the pandemic – making it difficult to disentangle the effect of the variant from other factors”.

The “difficulty for the government”, says Mark Woolhouse, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, is that if the variant is more transmissible, further measures need to be taken “sooner rather than later”. But, he tells The Guardian, the country would “almost certainly have to do that in the absence of robust information about whether we really need to do it”.